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A Tale of Piracy: How the Chinese Stole the Grinch

The Grinch may be stealing Christmas on movie screens across America, but Chinese copyright pirates have already done him one better: they've stolen the Grinch here.

Within a week after the Nov. 17 release in the United States of ''Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas,'' videodisc copies of the film were selling on China's streets for about $1.20 each -- further proof that China's well-oiled copyright piracy machine is running smoothly despite government promises to shut it down.

The discs are mocking reminders of the difficulties China has carrying out trade agreements even as it prepares to enter the World Trade Organization. Even the Communist Party's own anticorruption propaganda film, ''Life and Death Choice,'' is widely available in pirated copies across the country.

Some people say the government has been reluctant to crack down on the pirates because the steady stream of cheap American movies has helped keep alive the state-owned factories producing videodisc players by the millions.

China adopted the video compact disc format in the mid-1990's, before many people here had bought the videotape players popular in the West. Dozens of state companies began making the disc players, which have since been adapted to play higher quality digital videodiscs.

As Western antipiracy efforts bore down on software and music-copyright thieves in the past five years, the counterfeit compact disc industry switched to producing videodiscs instead of software and music discs. The disc player makers and the pirates grew in tandem, until today there is an oversupply of both. China produces 20 million VCD players annually, but current market demand is only half that amount. Videodisc shops, kiosks and sidewalk hawkers, meanwhile, have saturated the major cities with pirated videodiscs.

By the end of 1998, according to government press reports, about 50 million Chinese families owned the players and were regular buyers of movie discs. Many young, urban Chinese have collections of hundreds of movies; active swapping is conducted and information traded on web sites like lovemin.1999net.com and fzdvd.3322.net.

Prices of both the machines and the discs have fallen steadily: a video disc player may sell for $70, and movies for as little as 80 cents, with rentals even cheaper. The trade has made it almost impossible to sell legitimate videodiscs here, which cost more than double the pirated versions, and dampened the lure of Hollywood films in movie theaters, even though the quota of such films released in China will rise to 20 each year under the W.T.O. agreement.

''Chinese consumers don't want to pay 36 yuan for a VCD, see it once or twice and give it away,'' said K. Y. Lai, general manager of Shanghai CAV Thakral Home Entertainment Ltd., a Chinese-Singapore joint venture and China's largest distributor of Hollywood films on video. ''They would rather pay 6, 8 or 10 yuan to see a pirated copy and then throw it away.''

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His company did sell 300,000 legitimate copies of ''Titanic,'' its biggest success. But pirates sold 20 million to 25 million copies of the film. Even with less popular films, the pirates outsell legitimate distributors about 35 to one, Mr. Lai said.

Pirates have films on the streets in China as little as two days after their debut in American theaters, while legitimate distributors must wait nine months or more for video release. Pirates first record the movies with video cameras in American theaters, then ship the tapes to China, where editors add subtitles and, more recently, dub some of the films into Chinese. (''Grinch'' is available both dubbed and undubbed.)

The pirates then use computers to enhance the quality of later generations of the discs, and usually make new copies when the films are officially released on videotape or DVD. Competing pirated versions of the same film often circulate in the market, some of them smuggled in from factories in Taiwan.

In China, the videos are stamped onto discs with equipment imported from the West. Attempts to ban such imports are hopeless because the machines are easily broken down into components and imported piecemeal as ''machine parts.''

Many pirate disc labels carry the name of licensed VCD makers, but these state-owned factories deny they are involved with the copycats.

''We did not publish Guijingling,'' said an official of the Guizhou Cultural Audio-Visual Publishing House, the company whose name appears on one pirated version of the Grinch film. ''Guijingling'' is a Chinese word that means ''ghost,'' and is used as the translation of ''Grinch.''

The official said her company had tried hard to track down pirates who use the company's name. But even if a factory is found and closed down, the equipment is sometimes simply moved and production starts up again. ''It's just like drawing water with a bamboo basket,'' she said.

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A version of this article appears in print on December 12, 2000, on Page A00003 of the National edition with the headline: A Tale of Piracy: How the Chinese Stole the Grinch. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe